“That villain doesn’t feel love, because real love is selfless.”
Fine, you know what emotions aren’t selfless, and the villain can feel perfectly well?
Adoration, affection, admiration, lust, yearning, desire, devotion, obsession, possessiveness, fondness, tenderness, attachment, passion…
“real love is selfless” is also such a bizarre thing to say
how would you even define that. “selfless.” “real love”
“my mother has real, selfless love for me because she would give up everything for my sake” oh? and why does she do that? Would she do it for anyone who isn’t her kid? Why does she choose to do it for the one entity who is her own offspring, and not any of the other, unrelated people who need it more?
how could anyone claim there’s nothing selfish in that?
show me a love that’s selfless and i’ll show you a love that’s meaningless and also probably doesn’t exist. something of your self– whether it’s your genes or your past or your future or your ethics or ideology or whatever– has gotta be involved with a thing, for you to have any reason to care about it. That’s what caring is.
and, once you acknowledge your “self” being involved in love in that sort of way, you might go “well that’s not really selfish”… but then you think a little while longer, and you find out just how meaningless it is to try to define where the line of “really selfish” is.
that’s a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, which i’m very guilty of doing instinctively too.
no parent is like “ah, my genes, i must protect them”, and if there is, they’re at least halfway down a nazi pipeline online.
they do it because it’s part of the social contract. you have kids, you are legally (and more important to making the decision) socially responsible for the well-being of that child. in many cultures it is/was much more common to be closer to what you want selfless to mean, “it takes a village” style community parenting.
so many parents are abusive and neglectful because the social contract we have is simply too much for a lot of people to handle on their own. it’s not that they care less, they’re overwhelmed.
in the first place, neither “selfless” nor “love” are really well-defined enough to make any judgment on whether anyone is achieving them, in my opinion. what we do have is people who feel responsibility and obligation to one another. it’s a transaction. i’ll take care of you when you need it, if you’ll do the same for me. we create these contracts somewhat arbitrarily with a limited number of people. that’s not selfish, exactly, to not have that contract with everyone, but it’s not selfless either. the words almost don’t make sense there.
anyway, op’s post makes me think of my favourite combat yandere. a needless fight to the death–is that “love”? is it “selfless”? idk, it’s not really any different than having a good time with friends. giving one another what they need, them giving you what you need. a non-traditional contract, but i don’t think it’s meaningfully different from any other love in the way i’ve described.
I mean that’s basically my whole point. That the definition of selfless, and its relationship to love, is meaningless, or at least not definable in any useful way.
And that parents love their children for reasons that always, in some way, involve themselves – whether it’s because of their own desire to get something in particular out of raising a child, or just their feelings of obligation to a social contract. None of which can be wholly selfless, by any possible definition. Which is why selflessness as a measure of love is pointless.